The Taylors
by callipygian-pigeon
Summary: The terrifying Red John saga is over and just as a dysfunctional family in New York and Patrick Jane begin to make peace with their very different lives, Jane and Lisbon's engagement digs up a big and shocking secret that threatens to unravel it all again. *Still considering going through with this story so let me know your thoughts*


A car hits my nine year old son at ninety kilometres per hour. His tiny body jack-knifes skywards then falls with a sickening thud on to the cars bonnet like a ragdoll before bouncing down to the asphalt. The last words I've said to him only minutes before still ring in my ears.

"Stop it, Flynn. Just stop it! Your father's not coming home and you need to get that through your head. I can't handle you anymore. Why can't you just be normal?!"

I had tried to claw back these words as soon as they left my mouth as we faced each other in the kitchen but they rained upon my son like blows. He stood as still as a statue for a moment, surrounded by the broken pieces of crockery he had destroyed at the news of his father's remarriage and then he was gone in a blur of limbs, clutching his scrapbook to his chest. I fell against the kitchen cupboards and feel my knees buckle. I vaguely notice that I have crushed the glass dish I had been washing between my now bloodied palms in my outburst but mainly I only feel shocked and horrified at myself. I hear the front door slam and somehow my legs wobbly with nausea chase after him, calling his name. My blood runs cold as I can not immediately locate him in the front garden and I see the picketed gate swinging open in the wind. I realise suddenly the constant plaguing nightmare of one of my children being abducted and murdered becomes a split-second reality. The panic both alleviates and instantly resurfaces as I see the pale denim of his legs scissoring toward the busy road at the end of our street.

My old career as a runaway teenager and my new career as an anaesthetist provides me with a lifetime of ability to run fast but I sickeningly realise I'm too late as I hear the low rumble of a car cresting the hill and I spasm with fear as my world is dismantled yet again. The windshield glass winces and shatters into spiderweb designs on impact. The wheels throw up bits of gravel and bitumen as the driver brakes in a belch of petrol and screeching tyres. My son's golden head collides with the Earth with a sickening crack as he collapses like a crushed cigarette packet. His scrapbook is lying several feet away. Nearly a decade of medical and surgical experience and I freeze in tourniqueted silence. The pedestrians and home-bound schoolchildren are so still with their mouths agape like a carnival audience hushed in anticipation. Then the terror detonates inside me. Each ragged breath feels as though I'm inhaling fire. I hear a primal, bloodcurdling scream and realise it's my own. I fall to my knees beside him. A thickening, lacquered pool of blood is forming on the road around his halo of golden hair and the air is cleaved with my wailing but I manage, somehow, to wind my scarf around his head wound, fill his lungs with air and pump his heart trying to keep out of my head the familiar image of blood pouring between my fingers when I desperately pressed my hands against my toddler's slit throat trying to keep every drop of scarlet life inside her ten years ago.

I'm in the ambulance now, the paramedics tentatively moving around me as I work on my broken child. I don't need to insist that I'm a doctor so I must have come across these particular ones one night at work or at some hospital function. I am not aware of how much time has elapsed. I can't help but replay the impact over and over. The smell of burning rubber. The full throated roar of the crash. The terror exploded on to the screen of my eyelids. I feel again the shriek in my blood. The earth and sky merging, imploding, then finally coalescing into the fact: my son has been hit by a car. Years of unfairly uprooting and restricting this poor Autistic boy and his sisters from a normal life to protect them from an obsessive serial killer and his psychotic followers and it's my own angry outburst of poorly thought out words in a thirty second long argument that spills my child's blood.

Intensive care. Dr Emerson approaches me with the same face I recognise on myself when I have to tell relatives of patients bad news. "Dr Taylor, your son is in a coma."  
And then I'm vomiting in the staff bathroom, splashing water on my face and lying on the tiles as my eyes burn and my body starts to tremble. Grief shakes me between its jaws like a lion shakes a half-dead gazelle on that nature program Flynn rushes home from school for. I sit beside his pale, sleeping form when they allow me to. I strain my eyes until they sting but see no movement from him. I stroke a bruise which is erupting with the speed of a Polaroid on his soft cheek. Leo, my friend, neighbour and nurse at the hospital, sits beside me with a Superman comic book, one of Flynn's favourites, from the gift shop on his lap (a comic book for a boy in a coma is just the type of good hearted, well meaning but not completely thought through gestures only Leo could deliver like the bottle of wine he procured for me when I found out I was pregnant with twins not long after I moved here). Where is Superman when I need him, to reserve the Earth's rotation so that I can go back in time and not utter those hateful words to my dear child? Where is Stephen Hawking's wormhole in space, his gateways linking different parts of the universe so I can quantum leap backwards and bit my tongue? Flynn would be impressed that I actually paid attention enough to his ramblings to remember all this. All I can do is whisper to him that I'm sorry and how much I love him. Knowing how uncomfortable he is with this kind of emotion, I jokingly promise to eat my own foot so I won't put it in my mouth ever again. My tears splosh on to the sheet and Leo gently tells me he brought Charlotte and Zoe with him and can stay with them tonight if I wanted to stay with Flynn. Completely forgetting my two daughters who had been upstairs doing their respective homework really was the cherry on top of a day of absolute despicable mothering on my behalf. I try and compose my strangled voice enough to thank him and only hope it's intelligible.

"Is there anyone you want me to call?" he asks before hesitating. "His father, maybe?"  
Leo is my closest friend (and would be more than, if Charlotte had her annoyingly persistent way) and even after many years I have skated evasively around anything to do with before Charlotte and I moved here. He knows nothing about my family or Patrick or Red John and luckily never prods too much for information. Leo has put all of my overprotective, panicky and secretive tendencies down to fleeing an abusive husband and it seemed better than any alternative fake story I could think of.

His scrapbook, picked up by a paramedic at the scene, was lying on his bedside table. I pick it up and flick through the thick cardboard pages filled with newspaper articles. Flynn is the smartest child I know and even at a young age, he knew there wasn't something quite right about our life so I told him a version of the truth. I said that his dad was a very good man and was helping the police fight bad people – like the villains in his comic books – but a very bad man was angry about this and had wanted to hurt us so we had to move away so his dad could keep protecting people and fighting bad guys without worrying about us getting hurt. Since then, Flynn would scour the newspaper every day had cut out any article with mention to Patrick and paste it in his scrapbook. I hadn't realised til our huge argument that Flynn was expecting Patrick to come back to us after Red John was dead and had finished working for the police. Today he had found a wedding engagement notice in the paper.

I exhale painfully and Leo puts his hand over my own. I know he loves me although I wish for his own good that he wouldn't. Even though he was mental enough to fall for a mysterious pregnant woman with a traumatised child and a whole range of problems, he would be clinically messed up if he continued to feel the same if I told him the truth.

"It's all my fault." Raw with weeping, racked with guilty, my voice is seesawing with emotion.  
"I'm sure that's not true. Why don't you tell me all about it, Angela?"


End file.
